Focused on The Yellow Book and other avant-garde aesthetic periodicals that flourished in Great Britain at the fin-de-siècle, The Yellow Nineties Online is an open-access, peer-reviewed electronic resource. The site publishes facsimile editions of periodicals that expressed, in their distinctive material features, a politics of style engaging with contemporary issues of individual, group, and national identity. Available in a variety of formats (flip book; html; pdf; xml), these periodicals may be read online, searched, and downloaded. Completed editions include The Yellow Book (13 volumes) and The Pagan Review (1 volume). The Evergreen (4 volumes) is available for both reading online and downloading, and is being marked up for searching. The Dial, The Green Sheaf, and The Savoy are in preparation. Preserving the physical features of each periodical in virtual form, ...Read More

Introduction to the Yellow Nineties

In April 1894 a young bookseller’s clerk, John Lewis May, assisted the manager of The Bodley Head in arranging the shop window. As he later recalled: “I filled the window of the little shop in Vigo Street—the original Bodley Head—with Yellow Books, and nothing but Yellow Books, creating such a mighty glow of yellow at the far end of Vigo Street that one might have been forgiven for imagining for a moment that some awful portent had happened, and that the sun had risen in the West” (74). The “mighty glow of yellow” emanating from this unnatural dawn continued long past the launch of the avant-garde magazine of art and literature, and indeed long past its final issue three years later in April 1897. In 1913, Holbrook Jackson, describing the impact of The Yellow Book, explained: “It was newness in excelsis: novelty naked and unashamed. People were puzzled and shocked and delighted, and yellow became the colour of the hour, the symbol of the time-spirit. It was associated with all that was bizarre and queer in art and life, with all that was outrageously modern” (46). A more recent commentator on the 1890s, Simon Houfe, echoes Jackson’s judgment, declaring that The Yellow Book and the 1890s are synonymous, the periodical functioning as “both a microcosm of the fin de siècle and an important trend-setter” (83)...Continue Reading

Wednesday, October 30, 2013 Material Culture in a Digital Context June 1, 2013. Dennis Denisoff and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra presented "Devil in the Details: Prototyping a Digital Edition of The Evergreen" at Congress 2014, University of Victoria.